It’s easy to understand why Sir Keir Starmer said a big, fat ‘yes’ to Brighton and Hove Albion’s offer of free tickets to their crunch game against Arsenal on Saturday, April 6, this year.
The evening fixture was, after all, a sellout with the Labour leader’s beloved north London club locked in a compelling three-way battle against Liverpool and Manchester City for the Premier League title.
Not only could Sir Keir and his three guests, who included his wife Victoria, witness their side’s crucial 3-0 victory from padded seats, they’d also get to rub shoulders with the prawn sandwich brigade in the stadium’s lavish hospitality areas.
What was perhaps less clear – back then at least – was what had persuaded Brighton’s owner, Tony Bloom, to offer the lavish freebie.
Mr Bloom made his fortune as a professional gambler. He didn’t get where he is today by simply giving away valuable stuff (and hospitality seats for the corresponding fixture this year start at £390 each). Unless, that is, there might be what punters call a ‘return’ on the investment.
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer in the stands at Brighton & Hove Albion’s home game against Arsenal in the Premier League back in April
Starmer, David Lammy and Sue Gray are among the spectators at Tottenham Hotspur v Arsenal earlier this month
Yet, in this particular instance, that was very much the case. Opportunities to ingratiate oneself with a future Prime Minister may end up being worth billions of pounds, especially when you run one of Britain’s 20 Premier League clubs.
To appreciate why, consider two related facts.
First, Sir Keir is about to introduce a piece of legislation called the Football Governance Bill.
This will establish a regulator for our national sport, who may (or may not) be granted powers to dramatically re-distribute huge amounts of money from Britain’s cash-soaked elite clubs.
Second, hosting the Arsenal fan at matches has provided Premier League bosses, who wish to neuter the Bill by significantly limiting the new regulator’s powers, a cheap and extraordinarily effective way to curry favour with him. On match days, they get to personally bend Sir Keir’s ear, or, as people say in Westminster, lobby him.
It’s possible to witness this grubby process in action by looking at the photographs of Starmer’s trip to Brighton, which are carried on this page.
Taken in the stadium, they show him locked in conversation with a balding, middle-aged man wearing a dark overcoat and bright red tie.
We can reveal that this individual, who was seated directly adjacent to Sir Keir and Lady Starmer, was Arsenal football club’s executive vice chairman, Tim Lewis.
Mr Lewis wasn’t the only football bigwig who managed to gain priceless access to the Labour leader during the final weeks of the Premier League season, either.
In mid-February, West Ham had given Sir Keir two free tickets, worth £2,000, to their game against Arsenal. Images obtained by the Mail show him in the directors’ box that afternoon with Richard Masters, the Premier League’s CEO, and Phil Carling, one of the most powerful football agents in Britain.
On March 31, Starmer witnessed Arsenal’s game at Manchester City. He got two tickets, with hospitality, worth some £900.
Sitting just in front of him, as evidenced by a third set of stadium pictures, was Vinai Venkatchamen, Arsenal’s chief executive, and Lord Harris of Peckham, a member of its board. Shots taken at half time show him in discussion with a third individual wearing one of the distinctive club ties.
May 12, meanwhile, saw Sir Keir return to Manchester to watch his club take on United from the directors’ box, where he was given two tickets worth £1,790.
There he was, perhaps inevitably, photographed having a friendly chat with Sir Jim Ratcliffe, the club’s billionaire co-owner, who was sitting just in front of him with his sporting adviser Sir David Brailsford.
The Prime Minister enjoying the match as Arsenal host Wolverhampton Wanderers last month
Sir Keir with his wife Victoria prior to the Euro 2020 final between Italy and England at Wembley Stadium in 2021
Around the same time, Tottenham and Wolves offered him hospitality tickets to their home fixtures against Arsenal (value circa £4,000), while Arsenal handed out five tickets, worth £3,000, to its knockout Champions League fixture against Portuguese club Porto, which they won 4-2 on penalties.
In other words, the Premier League decided, between February and May, to shower Labour’s leader with a succession of very expensive freebies which, according to Starmer’s entry in the Register of Members’ Interests, were worth in the region of £12,000.
So what, when they took the opportunity to bend Starmer’s ear, might football’s blazer brigade have wanted in return?
The answer can almost certainly be found in Hansard, which records proceedings in Parliament. It details how, during this exact period, the aforementioned Football Governance Bill was wending its way through the Commons.
Originally conceived by Boris Johnson, who was spurred into action by the number of lower league clubs going bankrupt, the legislation was being taken forward by the Sunak regime, which had found time for two readings on the floor of the House.
And, while it had cross-party support, several of Sir Keir’s MPs were taking steps to dramatically bolster its scope. Shadow Sports Secretary Stephanie Peacock, in particular, was adamant a new regulator needed powers to redistribute so-called ‘parachute payments’, which see around £230 million a year handed to clubs that have recently exited the Premier League.
The payments are hugely contentious. Owners of existing top-tier clubs – including all those Starmer accepted freebies from –love them, since they make it relatively simple to bounce back in the unfortunate event of being relegated. They are, therefore, one of the things that maintain the lofty value of their investment.
Rivals in the lower leagues take the opposite view, since it makes it difficult, and very expensive, to compete for promotion to the ranks of the game’s elite. This has, in recent years, contributed to the likes of Derby County, Wigan, Bolton and Bury falling into administration, and helps explain why clubs in the Championship, the division directly below the Premier League, are carrying around £1.5 billion of debt.
Peacock understands this problem and wants to deal with it. So, on April 23, she tabled a crucial amendment to the Football Governance Bill that would have brought parachute payments under the regulator’s remit.
In a tub-thumping speech, she told Parliament that only if it passed ‘can we ensure that the regulator can fulfil the purpose of the bill’.
A few weeks later, however, Sunak announced a General Election, meaning that Parliamentary business temporarily paused. But since Labour’s manifesto committed it to passing the Football Governance Bill, it was expected that a beefed-up version, complete with the all-important amendment prepared by Peacock, who is now Sports Minister, would become law within a few months of Labour taking office.
That has not, however, happened. And lower-league clubs are increasingly concerned that Starmer will instead choose to overrule Peacock, and redraft the long-awaited legislation in a manner that his chums at Arsenal and other Premier League clubs might find more acceptable.
In good spirits at the West Ham United v Arsenal Premier League game in April
Lady Starmer (top left) accompanied her husband to the Brighton v Arsenal game in April
The fear, in other words, is that the Prime Minister has been nobbled – and his appetite for footballing freebies has caused a huge conflict of interest.
‘We expected the Department for Culture Media and Sport to push out the bill straightaway, with Labour’s previous amendments,’ says a source close to one club. ‘Instead, everything has gone quiet. People inside government are coming out with phrases like, ‘We don’t want to kill the Golden Goose’, which is exactly what the Premier League’s lobbyists have been parroting for years. We now think it more likely than not that Starmer will get Downing Street to call it in.’
Any such move would spark a major scandal for, in recent months, Sir Keir has continued to accept lavish hospitality from the Premier League in a way that, critics say, is unprecedented for any British PM.
On June 21, he accepted four free tickets to a Taylor Swift concert, paid for by the Premier League, which he declared were worth some £4,000.
And on August 17, after moving into Downing Street, he and his son watched Arsenal’s match against Wolves from the comfort of the directors’ box. Sitting directly to Starmer’s left was Arsenal’s chief operating officer, Karen Smart.
Most controversially of all, the Prime Minister turned up at the Tottenham Hotspur stadium earlier this month for the North London derby, on a freebie outing that saw him bring Foreign Secretary David Lammy, his Chief of Staff Sue Gray, and various members of their families along for the ride.
Their invitations were issued by Katie Perrior, who also sat in the box. She is a Westminster lobbyist who has worked for several top-flight football clubs in the past, most notably in 2021 when she oversaw the PR disaster that was the failed attempt by six Premier League clubs to join a breakaway European Super League.
In other words, one of football’s most controversial lobbyists was enjoying an afternoon out with the man who runs the country.
Little wonder that observers were stunned by photographs of the occasion, obtained by the Mail on Sunday. ‘When a lobbyist can pick up the phone and, for a few thousand quid, get the British Prime Minister and British Foreign Secretary to spend an entire afternoon in their company, at a venue owned by a former client, something has gone very, very wrong with politics,’ said one.
Charlie Methven, chief executive of League One’s Charlton Athletic, says: ‘This is a clear conflict of interest and a pretty drastic one at that. The decision over parachute payments is worth billions of pounds. Given the lavish financial benefits Keir Starmer has received, and continues to receive, how can he be trusted to act in the public interest?’
How indeed? The sheer quantity of football matches our Prime Minister accepted tickets to in recent years must surely cement his status as one of the most audacious freeloaders in British political history.
For his first six years in Parliament, he seems to have paid for his own tickets. But that habit was broken in July 2021 when, as Labour leader, he was increasingly seen by football’s authorities as a man worth getting to know.
That month, the FA invited him to the final of the European Championships at Wembley, which England lost to Italy. He sat between the organisation’s Chair, Debbie Hewitt, and Chief Executive, Mark Bulling. Four months later, he accepted his first tranche of tickets from the Premier League to Arsenal’s game against Watford (four tickets, with lunch worth £2,160), the first of six matches he took freebies for during that season.
Starmer at the Wolverhampton Wanderers v Arsenal Premier League fixture at Molineux Stadium in April
He accepted another four batches of free tickets during the 2022-23 Premier League Season. Then, as the debate over the football regulator gained traction, the hospitality campaign stepped up.
Between August 2023 and May this year, he was hosted by Premier League bosses at no fewer than 12 matches, at a rate of roughly one outing per fortnight. In total, he has attended 29 matches for free, of which 22 involved top-flight clubs.
At times, his freeloading was truly spectacular. In August 2023, for example, he was gifted a stay at a holiday home on the Gower Peninsula in Wales worth £4,500, by a local businessman.
Seemingly fancying a day out, he decided to take the family to watch Swansea play Bournemouth. But rather than digging into his pocket to get tickets for the game, which was not sold out and attracted just 8,700 fans, he cadged £800-worth of free hospitality tickets.
The overall value of football tickets Sir Keir has received in the past three-and-a-bit years is, according to the Register of Members’ Interests, some £39,791. However, that assumes the value attached to the tickets is accurate – and some of the Prime Minister’s entries look distinctly fishy.
For example, Starmer has claimed that four hospitality tickets to the North London derby in May 2022 were worth £531, or just over £132 each. According to Tottenham Hotspur, the cheapest hospitality packages at so-called ‘category A’ games start at £399-a-head and rise to £749 per ticket. It’s unclear how the Labour leader valued four tickets at just over £500.
To cite another curious example, Starmer claimed that his four tickets to the Brighton game in April were worth £500, or £125 each. Brighton’s cheapest packages start at £300.
Doubtless the accuracy, or otherwise, will be probed by the Parliamentary authorities in the coming weeks.
In the meantime, Starmer appears to be doubling down on his decision to place himself in the firing line of the Premier League’s smoothest lobbyists. This week, Downing Street told reporters that he was refusing to recuse himself from decision-making over the football regulator.
Football League clubs are duly agitated. ‘Sir Keir is at Arsenal every other week and been a regular guest of the other Prem clubs. What do you think they are talking about over drinks in the hospitality boxes?’ asks the chief executive of one Championship club.
‘The Premier League will do anything to clip the wings of the regulator. And the Prime Minister is accepting their hospitality at a time when the government is working on the legislation. At best it looks terrible, at worst it makes him vulnerable to influence.’
Others are comparing the growing scandal to events in 1997 when the newly-elected Tony Blair gave Formula One an exemption from a ban on tobacco advertising immediately after accepting a huge donation from its former owner Bernie Ecclestone.
‘If, when the bill is published, Labour’s previous commitment to include the parachute payments has been overturned there would need to be an inquiry,’ is how Charlton Athletic’s Methven puts it.
‘Given the scale of gifts accepted from the Premier League and Premier League clubs by the Prime Minister on a personal basis, it would make the Ecclestone affair look squeaky clean by comparison.’
That affair, of course, ended with a chastened Prime Minister Blair issuing a statement claiming to be a ‘pretty straight kind of a guy’.
Should Starmer neuter the football regulator, he may be tempted to say something similar.
But given the epic scale of his freeloading, and the growing whiff of corruption, would anyone in their right mind believe him?
